Last Spring, I was crushing on a bespectacled girl with green hair in my European literature class. I asked her out on a Wednesday, and she told me she had a boyfriend. I felt terribly sorry for myself the rest of the day. I got home and furiously moped to The Smiths in my bedroom for several hours. Then I moved to scribbling short stanzas of melodramatic verse, like: “Your hair is greener than the grass I want to lie in with you while we f---.”
Soon I found myself on the living-room couch, nursing a bottle of cheap red wine like some sort of consolation prize. It was midnight, and I had drank two-thirds of the sickly-sweet pinot noir when I decided to text my ex-girlfriend. She and I broke up in October. Or rather, I ghosted her. I’m not proud of this, but it’s what happened. We had been having unprotected sex and sleepovers consistently for a month when I stopped answering her texts. I left what we had for some reason I can’t quite place; maybe it was because her veganism made going out for food difficult, or maybe I was intimidated by her occasional use of hard drugs. Maybe I wasn’t ready to commit, or maybe I just wasn’t ready to commit to her. But there I was, months later, feeling lonely and nostalgic for the times we spent together. I pulled out my phone and started typing.
Many of us have been here, drunk on a weekday night, writing and rewriting some convoluted message to an ex-lover. Mine went something like this, though with many more spelling and grammatical errors: “So I know you probably hate my guts, and I don’t expect you to respond, but I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for the way I ended things. You didn’t deserve that. And to be honest, I miss you.”
She responded an hour later, after I finished the bottle of wine. “Do you want to come over?”
I rode my bike to her place, and we drank black coffee and smoked cigarettes on her couch. Her place was furnished with mismatched floral-print couches spotted with gray lint and burn marks. There was a small black milk crate between the couches in place of a coffee table. We talked for hours, and I stumbled through a long-winded apology. She called me an a--hole but forgave me. Eventually, I asked to see her room, and as we sat side by side on her twin-sized futon, I leaned in to kiss her. Making out, I ran my fingers through her short, soft hair.
Then we had sex. Without going into too much detail, I will say it was really enjoyable. It felt familiar and comfortable, yet somehow fresh, like sleeping in your bed for the first time after a long trip. And though this bed was an unreasonably firm couch-mattress, I still felt good, honest, pure.
And I think that’s the thing about having sex with an ex. You know what they like, and they know what you like. Plus, there’s no awkward tension of a first-time sexual encounter. It’s falling back into an easy routine, even if was only a one-time thing. You see, I tried to contact her about a week later, to see her again, but she didn’t respond.
Still, I feel like maybe that’s the point of hooking up with an ex. It’s a quick way to lift one’s spirits: It’s a good, passionate, friendly and romantic sex session with someone you know well. Then, you can go right back to being broken up. After all, you probably broke up for some good reason in the first place.
And maybe it was fitting she ignored me the same way I ignored her months before. I’m not bitter, just thinking.
Jeremy Haas is a UF English junior.
